Technique N°2 - Re-Phrasing the issue

How adding 3 words will help you focus on the key challenge.

At eYeka we believe that everyone is creative as soon as one opens his mind and lets ideas flow freely. To help creators from everywhere tackle brand issues, we are providing you with Creative Techniques. Browse them, play with them and add them to your daily creative process to generate your best ideas!

When you face a problem, simply re-stating it will allow your mind to refocus and generate more ideas.

Let’s start with an example from the New Sodas contest. In this challenge the question was to “Invent a new brand of soda without preservatives, artificial flavours or colours, to make it stand out from its competitors and appeal to 18-25 year-olds, as well as mothers and fathers.”

To get more ideas when facing a problem statement, one simple technique is to change the way the challenge is stated. Adding “In what ways” at the beginning of your problem statement will force your brain to focus on generating many different ideas (as ways is plural). “In what ways” also highlights the correlation between actions that will lead to a solution: one action leads to another and another, and another… until the problem is solved.

The problem statement in the example seems pretty clear. However to find powerful ideas you can start by adding “In what ways” at the beginning: “In what ways (with a name, label and story) can a new soda brand without preservatives, artificial flavors or colors, stand out from its competitors and appeal to 18-25 year-olds, as well as mothers and fathers?”

Now you can list the ideas that pop-out of your head!

Did you find new ideas to solve the problem? If yes, congrats! If not move on to the next technique!